BURNING SLED MUSIC

Why Burning Sled?

We get this question a lot.

A publisher needs a name. When it was time to choose ours, we thought of Rosebud, which was already taken. We've long admired the Kenosha-born one man band Orson Welles--particularly his great cinematic debut, Citizen Kane. The final tableux of the film consists of a tracking shot of Charls Foster Kane's effects--thousands of valuable works of art collected from around the globe--following his demise. What, a reporter asks, were Kane's last words? As "Rosebud" is whispered, a glimpse is caught of Charlie Kane's childhood sled being burned in a furnace; the effect is that of a dream's cremation.

In his autobiographical film, F is for Fake, Welles mused,

"Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. 'Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.' Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."